Ela Community

Ela Community is an extension of Ela Conf and brings year-round personal and professional development to our attendees and members in our Slack channel.

Our goal is to create a safe, supportive, inspiring and comfortable community for adult marginalized genders (18+) to gain the confidence needed to become leaders, speakers, and teachers in the world of tech.

Leadership skills are crucial to making an impact in the field and creating diversity in the workplace. Companies with greater top-level gender diversity perform better financially, are more empathetic, and more innovative. When marginalized genders become leaders, the entire tech community benefits.

Calendar

Is your company interested in adding an event to the Ela Community calendar? Please email hello@elaconf.com for a unique sponsorship opportunity.

AMA

We’ll be hosting a monthly “ask me anything” series in our Slack channel, #ama. These sessions will take place on designated weekdays either around 12PM EST or 6:30PM EST and last up to one hour, depending on the guest’s schedule.

Our goal here to to provide designated time to seek advice and support from peers related to work, communication, community, and technology. Everyone has a unique story and perspective to share and getting to know one another better can be educational and go a long way in feeling truly part of something. Through our mission we are dedicated to creating a welcoming, inclusive space for marginalized genders in tech to learn from and empower one another and part of that is providing a platform to ask questions.

We also envision this being a great opportunity to speak directly with employees of tech companies that are looking to hire, gaining valuable insider knowledge and preferences.

All guests this year will receive a complimentary ticket to Ela Conf 2017 🤗

How it Works

Guests will receive an invite to the Slack channel prior to the start of the #ama. Guests are asked to send along a short bio to organizers sharing their background and mentioning any specific work or projects they would be especially excited to talk about right now. Bios will be shared in #general in the time leading up to the event and used to promote the ama on Twitter.

Each session will begin with an introduction and shared bio on behalf of the organizers, followed by the start of participant questions. Guests will choose and answer questions until the established end time, though it may not be possible to touch on every submitted question. Following a threaded discussion format, participants are free to ask any follow-up questions they may have as well.

If as a participant you find yourself unable to attend a scheduled #ama please feel free to pass along your questions to an organizer before the event.

Upcoming and Past AMAs

Do you know someone who would be great as an AMA guest? Or would you like to recommend yourself? Fill out our AMA Suggestion Box form.

Allison is the Founder of Tech Ladies. Ask Allison about anything from how to turn your side hustle into a full-time business, bootstrapping a company, running an active community, diversity and inclusion and more!

To Join

Friendly reminder that the Ela community, including Slack, is for adult (18+) marginalized genders.

Rules and General Guidelines

As with all Ela related activities it’s essential that all participants follow our code of conduct.

Sponsoring

We have opportunities for companies to sponsor these events, gaining recognition as a supporter with mentions of company name and logo on presentation promo materials, social media, and in our calendar. These funds also help secure any relevant books that would make for appropriate attendee giveaways for certain topics.

For those looking to really join and engage with the community we also offer the opportunity for a woman employee to host an AMA. Please note that we require that presentations focus on sharing knowledge and experiences rather than direct company or product promotion; we’ll be posting more details about various partnership opportunities this month 🎁

Lunch & Learn

Each month the community will have the opportunity to sign up to attend a Google Hangouts presentation over lunch (12:00PM east coast time). The tone for these is casual, welcoming, and encouraging. The host is able to present for up to 30 minutes and determine whether they would like to take questions and where (live versus in the #lunchlearn channel as a follow-up).

These may also be recorded in the future if the host is comfortable with that as we understand not everyone has consistent or flexible lunch time each day.

Upcoming and Past Lunch & Learns

We’ve probably all heard that peer code reviews can do wonders to a codebase. Many of us probably work on teams that (hopefully) have some kind of formal code review process. But is that enough? Motivated by own code review experiences, I’ve done some research on the different types of code review processes, and which ones are the most effective. Let’s explore the history behind code reviews, and try and figure out what makes a strong code review, and what makes a painful one. By the end of this lunch and learn, you’ll know not just the theory behind code reviews, but also how to put a good one into practice on your own team!

We’ll be reviewing how to use vanilla JavaScript to create elements a user can drag with their mouse, as seen in this demo. After briefly touching on some significant user benefits of such UI, we will dive into understanding how to determine the position of a mouse click with mouse events and how to use that information to reposition the draggable element. Some basic JavaScript knowledge will be required.

This presentation will cover how to grab an SVG’s (Scalable Vector Graphics) code from Illustrator and add it to an HTML document, touch on the benefits of using it this way, and make note of how to prep these graphics for animation with CSS from the start.

Hosting

Attending

Each Lunch & Learn will have its own sign up form that will be shared in advance in Slack, on Twitter, and within the event details in the calendar.

Also, feel free to join the #lunchlearn channel in Slack to better capture questions that you may not get a chance to ask during the presentation.

Sponsoring

We have opportunities for companies to sponsor these events, gaining recognition as a supporter with mentions of company name and logo on presentation promo materials, social media, and in our calendar. These funds also help secure any relevant books that would make for appropriate attendee giveaways for certain topics.

For those looking to really join and engage with the community we also offer the opportunity for a woman employee to host a Lunch & Learn. Please note that we require that presentations focus on sharing knowledge and experiences rather than direct company or product promotion; we’ll be posting more details about various partnership opportunities this month 🎁

Spotlight

Our Instagram Spotlight series features amazing members in our community #elaspotlight.

Office Hours

The Ela #office-hours channel serves as a designated space for community members to connect directly with scheduled hosts to ask career related questions, get advice, and seek general support during publicized times.

Hosts can choose to have ongoing availability with set times, more sporadic availability, or choose to participate in a one-time, scheduled occurrence. Each host will post and maintain their availability, pinning to the #office-hours channel for quick reference.

Special Events

Brenna O’Brien is a professional coach for tech conference speakers and a front-end engineer at TED. Committed to increasing diversity in tech and building healthier developer communities, Brenna is a volunteer instructor for Ladies Learning Code, founder of NodeSchool Toronto, and a former bootcamp instructor for HackerYou. She has also spoken extensively about creative coding, developer culture, and navigating the tech industry as a beginner.

Topics: Finding conferences to submit to, Writing a great proposal, Talk preparation, Feedback on talk rehearsals, Navigating conference speaking as part of a marginalized group, Negotiating compensation, Pep-talks and encouragement, What to wear on stage. Anything public speaking related is fair game!